Sarah Vowell

When Sarah Vowell goes to Hawaii, you can bet its not to surf or get a tan. Indeed, over several research trips to the Aloha State, she spends most of her time doing interviews and poring through the archives to write Unfamiliar Fishes (Riverhead, $25.95), a history of colonial-era Hawaii. As in her Assassination Vacation and The Wordy Shipmates, Vowell doesnt pretend shes an academic or Ph.D. She can, and will, detour from her historical inquiry whenever she feels like it. If she sees something funny on TV, shell mention that. So, too, if she wants to get in digs at conservatives or evangelicals. And the latter, New England missionaries, launch Unfamiliar Fishes narrative in 1820, when they sail to civilize and Christianize the sun-baked, half-naked heathens of the Sandwich Islands. Bibles, clothing, disease, private property, sugar plantations, and a written version of the native language are soon introduced. The old customs and taboos rapidly collapse, and the islands incestuously related royal families are in swift declinethanks mainly to liquor and cashby the time of the 1898 Spanish-American War, which extended U.S. power across the Pacific. Vowell relates all this with her signature tone of droll disapproval. The missionaries are self-righteous prigs, and the royals cut down all the trees to sell for lumber. Still, in a very short, subjective account, Vowell lets certain facts speak for themselves. In the century between Captain Cooks arrival and U.S. annexation, she notes, the native Hawaiian population dropped by some 86 percent! Even the happy coda of President Obamas election cant change the sad tropical trajectory of Vowells tale. BRIAN MILLER